Currently, many healthcare assessments and interventions require the presence or active involvement and/or the diligence or attention of a clinician. Examples include the assessment of consciousness or lack thereof (whether a patient responds or does not respond to a non-noxious stimulus) and the assessment and documentation of patient comfort or pain score. Other examples include an intervention involving a request to bed-ridden patients to periodically take a deep breath to improve lung status and the intervention involving a request to bed-ridden patients to periodically shift their weight to prevent pressure sores.
A clinician may also be called upon to respond to alarm conditions of patient monitors in situations where the alarm is a result of a patient moving too much or positioned in a manner that obstructs a reading or creates a kink in tubing. These types of alarms may occur as high as 700 times per patient per day in some settings leading to “alarm fatigue” due to being called in to, for example, ask a patient to move less to eliminate/reduce motion artifacts during electrocardiography (ECG) or pulse oximetry or adjust their position to remove a kink or other obstruction in intravenous (IV) tubing.
Providing general hospital and pain management care, as well as pressure sore prevention and other quality of care metrics are deemed important in the healthcare environment. In cases where a healthcare worker or provider may not be or is suspected not to be compliant with patient care guidelines, such as providing sponge baths on a periodic basis, the patient can be asked as a quality control measure if a sponge bath was given. Similarly, consciousness monitoring during conscious sedation is currently performed by a clinician engaging in idle chit chat with the patient to verify that the patient is conscious.
As one example, the consciousness of a patient is an important factor for administering sedation as well as for monitoring head injuries. Typically, as a first assessment of consciousness, a patient's verbal response or actions in response to a query or prompt is used to indicate whether the patient is awake and conscious. However, when a patient is immobilized or cannot verbally communicate due, for example, to intubation, or the patient being mute or for unimpaired patients, a clinician being absent or otherwise preoccupied, other means are needed to assess the patient's care including consciousness.
Current systems for determining consciousness of a patient provide a switch or button for a patient to depress in response to a query or prompt. For example, if the patient is awake and conscious, the patient presses the button or toggles a switch in response to the query or prompt, thereby communicating consciousness. If no button press or switch toggle is registered within a set time period from the query or prompt, the patient is presumed to be unconscious.